Kevin Costner's SHAKESPEARE: RETRIBUTION (Coming 2011)

I've just heard that there's a new film being made about the life of Shakespeare. Directed by Roland Emmerich. You know Roland Emmerich. He directed that film where the earth almost gets destroyed but then doesn't. 'You mean Independance Day?'. Yeah, but that wasn't the one I...'Godzilla?' Yeah, but not that one. 'The Day After Tomorrow?' Oh, I'd forgotten about that. '2012'. Oh yeah...

Maybe I'm being unfair to the guy. He has directed other films. One of them had mammoths in it.

Knowing nothing about the film other than that it'll be about Shakespeare, a primitive version of the plot I expected surfaced in my mind. Shakespeare (played by Kevin Costner) is a reluctant meteorological expert and part time playwright who has an awkward relationship with his estranged wife (played by Anne Hathaway, in a piece of joke-casting far too intelligent to have been made intentionally) and two interchangeable blonde children. Strange scientific readings lead him to implore his colleagues to beware the Ides of March, which herald the coming of the Winter of Our Discontent. They fail to do so; but instead he is contacted by the Three Musketeers and, along with his trusty beagle Chumley, travels to the nearby city of France. There he is mistakenly identified as King Louis XVI (they both have beards, y'see. I think) and placed in a guillotine. In a moving scene he conducts a final, teary phone-call with his wife and improvises a sonnet, the beauty of which convinces the authorities to let him go, appoint him King, and place defences around France to prevent the coming disaster. Meanwhile his wife and kids manage to escape the Winter by riding the icy tidal wave on Shakespeare's second best bed, thus proving that he was a good husband after all. At the end of the film France is the only city left alive, and the death of millions is compensated by the fact that despite a few scrapes, Chumely survives. Oh and there's a scene where Shakespeare drop-kicks Napoleon and throws him off the Eiffel Tower. It's awesome.

Then I did a bit of research and found at it's actually going to be about the whole 'Who Was Shakespeare' thing, with the inevitable answer being 'not him'. More info here: http://www.empireonline.com/News/story.asp?nid=29834

Any rising confidence I might have had about the film (sparked by the fact that Rhys Ifans and David Thewlis are in it; though sadly it looks like Chumley's been dropped in pre-production) has been offset by the fact it's about this stupid Shakespeare imposter debate. Because the fact is, there's never been an even vaguely convincing theory to say Shakespeare wasn't Shakespeare. If you fancy evidence to back this up you can read the Peter Akyroyd book, or the much shorter and better Bill Bryson one. Or if you lack the time just become someone vaguely intelligent.

It seems to me that this debate isn't really to do with the fact that we know very little about Shakespeare, for there are plenty more authors that we know less about, or the idea that he doesn't seem educated enough to be the genuis that wrote his plays. It's just that people can't believe that someone so boring could ever write anything so interesting. Shakespeare doesn't appear to have done anything particularly gripping in his life, so stupid people continue to try and prove that he was actually someone else; and by someone else they mean literally ANYBODY even a little bit more interesting.

And I don't like that idea. I love that Shakespeare was probably a boring bastard. Speaking as someone who spends half their life sitting in their pants in their room I need to believe that boring people are capable of writing interesting things. Because otherwise I'm really fucked.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm off to write the film's spin-off sequel in which Chumley protects Queen Elizabeth from ninjas. So long.

Beowulf says Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

It might seem churlish, in a world where people are plagued by poverty, disease, addiction and any amount of other problems, that the greatest pain in my life is being caused by a man who died at least 1,500 years ago. And didn't even exist. But there you go. I suppose if I was the victim of any real hardship I'd probably spend my time, I don't know, dealing with it, rather than making poor jokes on my own on the web. So it is that my one sliver of misery is inflicted by a Swedish brick shit-house named Beowulf.

He's the subject of a poem written in old english; information that will immediatly start to piss you off, since 'poem' suggests something short, and 'english' suggests something written in English. Then you buy a copy and realise its a 3,500 line monster written in gobble-de-gook. You're having fun already.

When you actually get to reading the thing (having of course gone back to the bookshop and swapped your copy for a translation) you realise it's not really like reading a poem at all but more like playing a videogame. You play as Beowulf, whose special power is just generally being a massive lad. There are three levels, each with its own final boss. There's the beginners' level set in the mead hall Heorot, where you fight the monster Grendel. Next comes the obligitory boring underwater level where you defeat Grendel's mother. After a 50 year-odd pause whilst you go and take a piss, you reach the final level and face a dragon. He's a bit too hardcore for you, but luckily your second-player companion Wiglaf - here played by your annoying younger brother who can't press the 'b' button quick enough and tilts the controller like a racing wheel - is on hand to help you out, and you eventually triumph. Unfortunatly your brother's attempts to show you the treasure power-up fail, and you get Game Over anyway. All this is interspersed by boring cut-scenes where you find out about characters you never meet and couldn't care less about, but which you aren't allowed to skip. At the end you take the cartridge out and throw it into the garage, wondering why your parents couldn't have gotten you Super Mario Bros. 2 for Christmas instead.

I suspect that, outside the trappings of my horrid degree course, I might quite like Beowulf. Like a work collegue on a team building exercise, you think the two of you might have gotten on if you weren't stuck on an orienteering course with him and he's given you the map, by which I mean, is forcing you to work. Beowulf is a fun character. No whiny claptrap about past trauma and daddy issues for THIS hero - he kicks ass because he was BORN to kick ass. He rips arms off with his bare hands and can breathe underwater. He doesn't learn anything through his exploits. There's no love interest or comic sidekick. Just an appealingly homoerotic subtext (Beowulf keeps finding that his 'sword' is useless against his foes and has to use his 'fists' instead) and a fuck-off dragon. Beautiful.

As it is, he's really starting to get on my tits. I've begun picturing him as one of those Saturday morning cartoon hero's who hand out parentethical advice - Superman Says Say No To Drugs, Spiderman Says Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires, etc - except he's only got one piece of advice, and it's 'read more Beowulf'. Which gets really grating after a while. Luckily I found the perfect way to solve this problem, which was bitching about the guy in a blog post instead of doing what he says. How strong do you feel now, huh, Beowulf? You may be able to slay dragons, but you can't even get an 18 year old student to do his essay and translation? You baby.

And if you were wondering, I did do that picture. What a valuable way to spend my time.

First Edition

I've started getting pretty weird around books. And not in a good way. Not in that endearing, love of knowledge sort of way that's a necessary requirement for being a straight-A student or at least the twelve year old heroine of a children's novel. It's a sickness of the anorak variety. It has nothing to do with what's inside books. This is a purely physical infatuation. It's all about the editions, baby. They drive me wild.

I mean, books are beautiful. They look great; both new and old, when crisp or when worn. They sound great. That dry rattling of riffling pages, or the muffled thud they make when hitting a desk or a floor. Fuck, they smell amazing. Open a copy fresh of the shelf, put it to your face, inhale...it's pant-dampening stuff, it really is.

Until recently, the problem was a manageable. Without money or any real need to buy books, I could keep it almost under wraps. Furtive glances at window displays, or the occasional thumb-through, that was all. But since starting Uni I'm buying books in a quantity I'm not used to; maybe two or three a week. These are mainly 'classics', which means they're out of copyright and come in roughly about as many editions as there are people. For any normal, un-fucked student, this would be fine. Just a matter of weighing price against availability and going for the compromise. But for me it's a torture and an ecstasy, a terrible vice, a blissful compulsion, a fucking gorilla on my back. I've become a publishing junky.

I spend hours in bookshops. I skulk along the aisles in dark glasses and a trench coat. Shop-assistants know me on sight. Children run away from me. I look up at the rows upon rows of Austens and Brontes and Dickens wearing an expressions like a stroke victim getting sucked-off. I run my finger over the spines and shudder with delight. I pluck them down from the shelves and riffle the pages from one thumb to another. Bent corners and dust-jacket tears fill me with a kind of revulsion. If I see someone opening them all the way down to the crease and letting the spine wrinkle I feel like stabbing them. I breathe heavily down their necks until they leave. I watch managers emerge and try dreaming up a legitimate reason to get rid of me. It's a bloody disgrace. He should be paying me. I'm the fucking book-master.

At night I wrestle with myself over the crucial debates until the early hours of the morning? Penguin Classics or Oxford World's? The stark black of the Penguins lends them a weighty, sombre authority; but the white and red of the Oxford Worlds feels more exciting, more seductive. But both are expensive. For the less funded obsessive there's always the filthy temptation of the Wordsworth Classics with their shoddy covers and coarse paper; a guiltless indulgence at £2 a go. Do we want an introduction? Too long a one feels messy, but one by a decent academic is always a plus; a trusted pimp guiding you into the arms of his whore. Dare we go hardback? A rare option, but it prevents against unsightly damage later down the line. Do we prefer plays to come separately or in a single edition? Do we like our poems collected, or in their original, slimly digestible forms? Do we want to end up with a library of uniformed, eugenic clarity, or go for the charmingly jumbled feel? Is it ever okay to lick them? These questions obsesses me to the point of madness.

And when I can't take it any more, when I can't stand the internal struggle, I picture the holy grail; the Faber & Faber poetry editions. Fuck me are they beautiful. The minimalist, bare coloured-covers, the regal font, the creative white space around the text...And that smell! Moistening the crotches of every pretentious tosspot around the country to atlantean levels. Sometimes, when the obsessing's at its worst, I stand by the window in the moonlight with my copy of The Whitsun Weddings in one hand and grimly toss myself off with the other. They're just that good.

And that's basically how I live my life! Diddle-di di!